• Another mass shooting and another and another (This week in books)

    Updated: 2023-01-27 19:11:07
    I’m not quite ready to return to full blogging in the wake of the recent mass shooting in California (calling it that doesn’t even narrow it down), which hit very close to home literally and figuratively. I and my loved ones are okay, but I’m going through that heavy time where I’m feeling a lot […]

  • New Job-Hunter Support Group course offered by Bobby Kennedy

    Updated: 2023-01-26 08:00:00
    Bobby Kennedy provides various courses on becometechnicalwriter.com to help people transition into technical writing. Previously, he mostly offered eight-week Jump School courses. Starting this spring, he's also offering a new, one-of-a-kind course called the Job-Hunter Support Group, which focuses on helping people find job openings for technical writers, prepare a resume and portfolio, and interview convincingly for the positions. The following is a Q&A with Bobby about the new course. (Note: This is a sponsored post.)

  • New series: Sitting, standing, and walking

    Updated: 2023-01-25 08:00:00
    I'm starting a new series called Sitting, standing, and walking. Near the end of my last series on Journey away from smartphones, I described the growing discontent I felt by sitting in front of a screen all day. I longed to be outside, walking, engrossed in a panoramic view of the surrounding sky. Instead, it seemed most of my life, especially working in tech, was spent sitting. This series is all about ways to reduce sitting and avoid a sedentary life in front of the screen.

  • The worst sentence structure on the planet (This week in books)

    Updated: 2023-01-20 20:29:53
    This week! Books! David Owen of The New Yorker and I should absolutely go bowling together because he has written an exhaustive screed against front-loaded, somersaulting sentences, which has a surprising history with roots in journalism and misguided “elegant variation.” David my man, tell it like it is: The awkwardness is obvious if you imagine […]

  • Do you want the reader to understand your story? (page critique)

    Updated: 2023-01-19 20:00:00
    If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in our discussion forums: Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your redline […]

  • Infuse a character’s desires into their observations

    Updated: 2023-01-16 20:00:00
    One of the most fundamental principles for writing a novel is that characters need to want something and they need to actively go after that thing. In genre fiction, this is often either self-evident (the character needs to defeat the dragon or solve the crime) or translated into something very concrete. It’s fine to simply […]

  • Human arbitrarily deemed “royalty” smashes book sale records (This week in books)

    Updated: 2023-01-13 20:00:00
    This week! Books! A Los Angeles-area expat who, due to the entirely arbitrary circumstances of his birth and heredity, certain portions of society have assented to deem “royalty,” and who parlayed the resulting status and wealth into a marriage with a successful American actress, had a book ghostwritten about his life and went on to […]

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